Find True North, a film essay by Sean Maher.

When I watched the Road Warrior it was 4 am and I was a teenager soon to be trapped in a wasteland. I liked The Dark Knight when I was a kid. Batman was cool to me. The Joker was scary and cool. I had a DVD of the Nolan film and I watched it a lot. Those two films share a similar place in my mind but with two different aesthetics. I watched the first Mad Max and immediately threw on the second one. I think the first two Mad Max films should be watched together. The first movie is the backstory of how the world died and became a wasteland. It functions much in the same way that Batman Begins functions to the Dark Knight. Telling of Batman being formed in Bruce Wayne and Gotham’s consciousness. As a teen I was obsessed with my own thoughts. I remember every day going to school and coming to realizations. Having thoughts about the world. A mind growing. I was hopeful, curious. At some point I fell in love and eventually broke my own heart and I couldn’t go on just the same as I had been. A year from this point I started calling myself a nihilist.

During that year between not a nihilist and heck yeah I’m a nihilist I just sorta lived. I would go to school, write and go home. Not talking to anyone except when it was to answer a question or if I had to. It was my second to last year of high school and I had no friends. I was not happy and I wasn’t not okay. I mean. Any sadness I felt was paper thin. All I did was survive day to day. I looked forward to writing and that was it.

Mad Max has hope, but its a vicious hope. Characters are motivated. They have their priorities and everything else is second. Max himself as a character is not the moral center of the film, if there even is one. His motivation is all for himself. I got into an argument with someone once about the point of Mad Max 2. Max goes through the whole film serving only himself until the end. He is a survivor who doesn’t trust people. He is a nihilist. Survival is the only meaning he can cling to after losing his family in the first film. My associate I’ll call him thought that he was right that when Max is abandoned by a group of survivors he tries to help. He thought that Max was right. I think he was skin deep into that film. To me Max and the survivors were just serving themselves in the way that made sense to them. It doesn’t betray any deep flaw in humanity but illustrates a need for survival. Max chose self sacrifice for this town. He offered himself as a sacrifice and he feels betrayed when they take his heart out. They are doing what leads them to the green place and if he had died he would have given his life for that. The post apocalypse takes him apart in the way he expected. I think Mad Max 3 confirms that George Miller’s intent was for Max’s hope and moral center to be restored, that reestablishing civilization is the goal. Because the wasteland can’t go on forever.